Category: Political Science
The importance of economic growth for Italy
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, they chose an appropriate image, here is one excerpt:
Decay is another problem faced by Italy, including decay of its natural and cultural heritage. The city of Venice — a wonder of mankind and also a big money-maker as a tourist destination — is threatened by rising water levels. The Roman Coliseum is endangered by traffic fumes and exhaust. Solving those problems requires (again) extra money. As it stands, Italy has some of the worst-maintained cultural heritage in the Western world, and further decay could cut into Italy’s tourist income, producing another dangerous downward spiral.
There is much more at the link.
My Conversation with Masha Gessen
Here is the transcript and audio, here is the summary:
Masha joined Tyler in New York City to answer his many questions about Russia: why was Soviet mathematics so good? What was it like meeting with Putin? Why are Russian friendships so intense? Are Russian women as strong as the stereotype suggests — and why do they all have the same few names? Is Russia more hostile to LGBT rights than other autocracies? Why did Garry Kasparov fail to make a dent in Russian politics? What did The Americans get right that Chernobyl missed? And what’s a good place to eat Russian food in Manhattan?
Here is excerpt:
COWEN: Why has Russia basically never been a free country?
GESSEN: Most countries have a history of never having been free countries until they become free countries.
[laughter]
COWEN: But Russia has been next to some semifree countries. It’s a European nation, right? It’s been a part of European intellectual life for many centuries, and yet, with the possible exception of parts of the ’90s, it seems it’s never come very close to being an ongoing democracy with some version of free speech. Why isn’t it like, say, Sweden?
GESSEN: [laughs] Why isn’t Russia like . . . I tend to read Russian history a little bit differently in the sense that I don’t think it’s a continuous history of unfreedom. I think that Russia was like a lot of other countries, a lot of empires, in being a tyranny up until the early 20th century. Then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history. That’s a 20th-century phenomenon that has a very specific set of conditions.
I don’t read Russian history as this history of Russians always want a strong hand, which is a very traditional way of looking at it. I think that Russia, at breaking points when it could have developed a democracy or a semidemocracy, actually started this totalitarian experiment. And what we’re looking at now is the aftermath of the totalitarian experiment.
And:
GESSEN: …I thought Americans were absurd. They will say hello to you in the street for no reason. Yeah, I found them very unreasonably friendly.
I think that there’s a kind of grumpy and dark culture in Russia. Russians certainly have a lot of discernment in the fine shades of misery. If you ask a Russian how they are, they will not cheerfully respond by saying they’re great. If they’re miserable, they might actually share that with you in some detail.
There’s no shame in being miserable in Russia. There’s, in fact, a lot of validation. Read a Russian novel. You’ll find it all in there. We really are connoisseurs of depression.
Finally there was the segment starting with this:
COWEN: I have so many questions about Russia proper. Let me start with one. Why is it that Russians seem to purge their own friends so often? The standing joke being the Russian word for “friend” is “future enemy.” There’s a sense of loyalty cycles, where you have to reach a certain bar of being loyal or otherwise you’re purged.
Highly recommended.
Brazil fact of the day
Brazil’s fiscal incontinence is legendary. The number of civil servants grew by 60% between 1995 and 2016, to 12m. Since public-sector workers cannot be fired or have their pay cut, they become a permanent expense once hired. Perks such as raises for seniority can even extend to widows’ pensions, producing the unique “post-mortem promotion”. Nearly 80% of government spending in Brazil goes on salaries and pensions, compared with a global average of 50-60%. “Instead of a state that serves the public, you have a state that serves the state,” says Samuel Pessôa of the Brazilian Institute of Economics at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, a university.
Here is the full article from The Economist, which focuses on fiscal sanity in the state of Espirito Santo.
Has anyone said this yet?
Consider the right-wing, conservative, and libertarian movements — is there a good word for them as a general collective? For now I’ll use “conservative,” while recognizing that the lack of generally recognized standard bearers means that “conservative” and “radical” these days blur into each other, and furthermore conservative and libertarian views have areas of real and significant conflict.
Who is today the most influential conservative intellectual with other conservative and libertarian intellectuals? (I once said Jordan Peterson is the most influential intellectuals with the general public.)
It seems obvious to me that this is Peter Thiel (admittedly I am a biased observer, for a number of reasons, one being that the Thiel Foundation is a supporter of Emergent Ventures). Quite simply, if Peter gives a talk with new material in it, it gets discussed more than if anyone else does.
What else might his qualifications be for “most influential conservative intellectual”?
He has had a major hand in the tech revolution, and with his later view that technology is stagnating more generally.
He is the talent spotter par excellence, having had a hand in the rise of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Eric Weinstein, and others.
A major hand in Trump/populism/nationalism, or whatever it should be called. I should note that Peter is often highly influential with those who disagree with him about Trump.
Spoke/wrote/co-authored a bestselling book — Zero to One — which also was a huge hit in China. And the samizdat lecture notes, from Peter’s Stanford talks, were a big hit in advance of the book.
A major hand in the critique of political correctness, and the spread of that critique.
He foresaw that globalization might contract rather than keep on expanding. The final answer isn’t in yet on this one, but so far Peter is looking prescient.
A major hand in causing people to rethink higher education, through his Thiel Fellows program.
A major hand in stimulating the interest of others in Girard and Strauss, and maybe someday Christianity?
This point has nothing to do with how much you agree with Peter or not. It simply occurred to me that no one had said this before, or have they?
By the way, here is David Perell on Peter Thiel on Christianity.
Has the time come and passed for negative interest rates?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Step back and consider the cultural context. Germany is still scarred by the memories of two world wars, fascism, communism, deflation and hyperinflation: in general, huge instability. Since the end of World War II, however, personal savings and the banking system have been an oasis of predictability and a driver of growth. Many Germans treasure their frugality, perhaps excessively or irrationally, and it has become an important part of the narrative Germans tell themselves about the economic order they have built.
Now enter the ECB, in essence telling Germans (and others) that savings are a bad thing, to be taxed and penalized. The very word “negative,” as in “negative interest rate,” makes the policy hard to sell politically. The German word “Strafzinsen” refers to a penalty rate, but the root “Straf” also refers to punishment, and it was used effectively by Franz Kafka in his famous torture-laden short story “In the Penal Colony” (the German title is “In der Strafkolonie”). One German newspaper referred to the “final expropriation” of the German saver, noting that the ECB’s decision to deviate from its inflation target carries “grave consequences.”
More generally, a significant segment of the German population is upset or outraged by the policy. There is even a claim that the revenue from the negative interest payments will be used to finance other EU countries.
Most economists and central bankers view negative interest rates as an acceptable tool of macroeconomic management. Maybe so. But in an era when trust, including trust among nations, is much lower than previously thought, it probably isn’t a good idea to place a punishing new tax on the German national virtue of saving. Central bankers must also be sensitive to public relations.
I find it striking how many people are responding to this column by insisting that Merkel should do more fiscal stimulus. She should (though I don’t find “stimulus” to be the most instructive word here), as I suggest in the piece, because the Germans have been letting their infrastructure run down for a good while now — internet speeds anybody? But at the end of the day, I don’t think that spending will eliminate the basic macroeconomic problem facing the EU, nor is most of that spending likely to land on the doorstep of the countries which most need it (though Huawei may benefit a good deal). There is also this:
So if a policy of negative interest rates is just a Band-Aid, it is one that should be ripped off. And if monetary policy is insufficiently expansionary, that is going to require an increase in the ECB’s inflation target, or a move to nominal GDP targeting, not a jerry-rigged tax on deposits.
There is also an argument that Germans are saving too much. But by some measures, they have a level of national wealth relatively low for their per capita income, in part because Germans are less likely to own their own homes. According to the OECD, Germany’s near neighbors Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland all save more in percentage terms than Germany does.
German savers: underrated.
Identity Politics Versus Independent Thinking
Anthony Kronman, former Dean of the Yale Law school, writes in the WSJ:
The politically motivated and group-based form of diversity that dominates campus life today discourages students from breaking away, in thought or action, from the groups to which they belong. It invites them to think of themselves as representatives first and free agents second. And it makes heroes of those who put their individual interests aside for the sake of a larger cause. That is admirable in politics. It is antithetical to one of the signal goods of higher education.
…Grievance is the stuff of political life…Academic disagreements are different. Important ones are often inflamed by passion too. But the goal of those involved is to persuade their adversaries with better facts and arguments—not to bludgeon them into submission with complaints of abuse, injustice and disrespect to increase their share of power. Today, the spirit of grievance has been imported into the academy, where it undermines the common search for truth by permeating it with a sense of hurt and wrong on the part of minority students, and guilt on the part of those who are blamed for their suffering.
…For college students, the search for truth is important not because reaching it is guaranteed—there are no such guarantees—but as a discipline of character. It instills habits of self-criticism, modesty and objectivity. It strengthens their ability to subject their own opinions and feelings to higher and more durable measures of worth. It increases their self-reliance and their respect for the values and ideas of those far removed in time and circumstance. In all these ways, the search for truth promotes the habit of independent-mindedness that is a vital antidote to what Tocqueville called the “tyranny of majority opinion.”
…Tocqueville was an enthusiastic admirer of America’s democracy. He thought it the most just system of government the world had ever known. But he was also sensitive to its pathologies. Among these he identified the instinct to believe what others do in order to avoid the labor and risk of thinking for oneself. He worried that such conformism would itself become a breeding ground for despots.
As a partial antidote, Tocqueville stressed the importance of preserving, within the larger democratic order, islands of culture devoted to the undemocratic values of excellence and truth. These could be, he thought, enclaves for protecting the independence of mind that a democracy like ours especially needs.
Today our colleges and universities are doing a poor job of meeting this need, and the idea of diversity is at least partly to blame. It has become the basis of an illiberal and antirational academic cult—one that undermines the spirit of self-reliance and the commitment to truth on which not only higher education, but the whole of our democracy, depends.
The Venetian electoral college
For more than five centuries (from 1268 to 1797) the procedure to elect the doge (chief of state) did not change.
- Choose 30 members of the Great Council by lot.
- These 30 people are reduced by lot to 9.
- These 9 people choose 40 other people.
- These 40 are reduced by lot to 12.
- These 12 people choose 25 other people.
- These 25 people are reduced by lot to 9.
- These 9 people choose 45 other people.
- These 45 people are reduced by lot to 11.
- These 11 people choose 41 other people.
- These 41 people elect the doge.
Funny that many Americans blame their electoral system for being complicated. You may think what you want about the Venetian system but it guaranteed what was probably the most stable government in the history of mankind.
That is from Alexey Tereshchenko on Quora, cited in this excellent post on the success of Venice.
My Conversation with Kwame Anthony Appiah
Here is the audio and transcript. We covered Ghana, Africa more generally, cosmopolitanism and the resurgence of nationalism, philosophy and Karl Popper, Lee Kuan Yew, the repatriation of cultural objects, Paul Simon, the smarts of Jodie Foster, sheep farming in New Jersey, and the value of giving personal advice.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Take Pan-Africanism. Do you think, in the broader course of history, this will go down as merely a 20th-century idea? Or is Pan-Africanism alive and well today?
APPIAH: Pan-Africanism involves two different big strands. One is the diasporic strand. The word Pan-Africanism and the Pan-African Congresses were invented in the diaspora by people like Sylvester Williams in Jamaica and W. E. B. Du Bois from the United States and Padmore.
That idea of a diasporic African identity seems pretty lively in the world today, though it doesn’t produce much actual politics or policy, but the sense of solidarity of people of African descent, of the African diaspora seems pretty strong to me.
COWEN: But strongest outside of Africa in a way, right?
APPIAH: Yes, where it began. In Africa, I think, on the one hand, that most contemporary sub-Saharan Africans do have a sense of themselves as belonging to a kind of Black African world. But if you ask them to do something practical about it, like take down borders or do more political integration, I don’t know that that is going to go anywhere anytime soon, which I regret because I think, for lots of reasons, it would be . . .
My sister and her husband live in Lagos. If they want to go to Accra by road, they have to cross the border between Nigeria and Benin, the border between Benin and Togo, the border between Togo and Ghana. And at each of those borders, they probably have to interact with people who are going to try and extract an illegal tax on them.
COWEN: Easier to fly to London, right?
APPIAH: Much easier to fly to London and back to Accra. That’s crazy. And we’ve had these weird things. On the one hand, there’s probably a million Ghanaians in Nigeria, living Ghanaian citizens.
And:
COWEN: Is cosmopolitanism not only compatible with nationalism, but in a way quite parasitic upon it? And in a sense, the parasite is being ejected a bit? Think back to your boyhood in Kumasi. You have all these different groups, and you’re trading with them. You see them every day, and that works great, but there’s some central coherence to Ghana underlying that.
You go to Lebanon today — that central coherence seems to have been gone for some time. You could call Lebanon a cosmopolitan place, but it’s not really an advertisement for Lebanon the way it’s worked out. Are we just moving to a new equilibrium, where the parasitism of cosmopolitanism is now being recognized for what it really is?
APPIAH: I don’t like the metaphor of the parasite.
[laughter]
APPIAH: But yes, I do want to insist that cosmopolitanism . . . Look, cosmopolitanism, as I said, does not only require, or the right kind of cosmopolitan requires a kind of rootedness, but its point, precisely, is that we are celebrating connections among different places, each of which is rooted in its own something, each of which has its distinctive virtues and interest, each of which has its own history. And we’re making connections with people for whom that place is their first place, just as I am in a place which is my first place.
So yes, cosmopolitanism requires, I think, a national sense of solidarities that are not global. That’s why, as I say, you can be a cosmopolitan patriot. Now, if the nationalist says, “Okay, but why do we need anything beyond national citizenship?” The answer is, we have a world to manage. The economy works better if we integrate.
There is much, much more at the link, self-recommending…
Rational discourse about the federal budget has become virtually impossible
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The conservative and fiscal conservative response has been no more coherent. On one hand, conservatives like to boast of the power of economic growth. But if, as they often assume, the economy is going to keep growing strongly, a widening budget deficit may well prove manageable. Interest rates have been low, and even falling over the past year, while economic growth has been running over 2%. If it continues to exceed the government’s inflation-adjusted borrowing rate (currently negative for T-Bills and close to zero for longer maturities), the U.S. will be able to grow out of its debt. Under this scenario Trump will look like a genius, and the fiscal conservatives will continue their slide into irrelevance.
You might argue that the problem is government spending, rather than budget deficits per se. But the U.S. can in essence pull in more resources from abroad, finance greater spending and consumption with additional borrowing, and still pay off its bills in orderly fashion without bankrupting the future. Our grandchildren can inherit both the debt and the government bonds.
In my experience, fiscal conservatives hate this argument. But through the term structure of interest rates, markets are forecasting low rates for at least the next 10 years, and conservatives tend to respect market prices. To be against the budget deal is also to go against the markets’ current message that debt service costs will remain low.
There are twists and turns in the piece, and just about everyone gets whacked, so don’t judge the final message by that excerpt alone.
A test of Marginal Revolution political bias
Here is an email from Daniel Stone at Bowdoin, I am not imposing a double-formatting on it for ease of reading and formatting:
“Dear Tyler (if I may),
I’m a big fan of your work in general, and MR in particular, and think that you do as good a job as anyone at exploring a variety of political perspectives, and sharing related (diverse) research.
Still, you’re human after all J. I’ve always been curious if there are systematic patterns in your writing or links you post.
It occurred to me a couple weeks ago that you sometimes describe research as speculative or imply this by adding a question mark to the end of the link (the example that made me notice this was: “Minimum wage effects and monopsony?”https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/07/thursday-assorted-links-215.html). At other times your link simply states the main research finding or directly quotes from the paper or its title.
So, while it might be hard to identify a general bias in your links – even if the majority were, say, “pro-liberal”, this wouldn’t necessarily mean *you* were biased, since the majority of good research out there could be pro-liberal, using the added “?”s provides an identification strategy: if you were more likely to add a ? for research that leans one political direction or the other, that would suggest a bias on your part.
As a fun side project, that I thought might also have some value given the importance of MR and understanding bias more generally, I had my RA (Maggie Hanson, cc’d) grab all your links from Assorted Links posts to social science research this year (as of a few days ago). Together we coded the ‘slant’ of each as L, R or N (neutral) – depending on whether the research supports regulation, indicates market failure, etc (admittedly our process here was not extremely scientific). She also recorded whether your link text is phrased as a question (or notes that the finding is speculative, which you did a couple times and seems similar). In addition, for link text phrased as a question, we also noted whether this text is a direct reference to the research paper’s title, as this means you didn’t actually add the “?”.
We did a bit of very basic analysis, here are results:
The distribution of slant across links is quite balanced, but leans left:
. tab sla
Slant |
(L/N/R) | Freq. Percent Cum.
————+———————————–
L | 35 29.17 29.17
N | 58 48.33 77.50
R | 27 22.50 100.00
————+———————————–
Total | 120 100.00
But you were slightly more likely to phrase your link as a question for “L” links vs for Rs (9/35 for Ls vs 5/27 for Rs):
. tab slant endswith
Slant | Ends with ?
(L/N/R) | n y | Total
———–+———————-+———-
L | 26 9 | 35
N | 48 10 | 58
R | 22 5 | 27
———–+———————-+———-
Total | 96 24 | 120
And you were a bit more likely to do this for links that were not direct quotes of article titles that were questions (7/33 = 0.21 for Ls vs 2/24=0.083 for Rs):
tab slant endswith if linktex==”n”
Slant | Ends with ?
(L/N/R) | n y | Total
———–+———————-+———-
L | 26 7 | 33
N | 48 8 | 56
R | 22 2 | 24
———–+———————-+———-
Total | 96 17 | 113
But the magnitude of this difference is not large (and I bet not statistically significant), and the large majority of both L and R links were presented by you without questions marks.
Bottom line: you do present a quite balanced set of research findings, the general distribution leans left but it is hard to interpret this (without knowing the slants of research in general or the slant of research you post elsewhere, aside from Assorted Links). And there is suggestive evidence of a small tendency for you to be more questioning of research supportive of liberal/leftist policies.
Here’s a link to the data:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CrPqezV51SCwAwuwjdRqBy4jUlX76Iti0X4P1nKPMpM/edit?usp=sharing
This includes a sheet with all the links that end in ?, that aren’t quotes of article titles, and their slants.
I wanted to share this with you before sharing with others. Please feel free to let me know any questions or comments!
Thanks, and thanks again for all your work. All the best – Dan”
Jacob Rees-Mogg issues style guide to staff
1. Organizations are SINGULAR
2. All non-titled males — Esq.
3. There is no . after Miss or Ms
4. M.P.s — There is no need to write M.P. after their name in body of text
5. Male M.P.s (non-privy councillors) — in the address they should have Esq. before M.P. (e.g., Tobias Ellwood, Esq., M.P.)
6. Double space after fullstops
7. No comma after ‘and’
8. CHECK your work
9. Use imperial measurements
And:
Among the list of bizarre rules, he asks staff not to use the words “got”, “very” or “equal”.
Here is the full story, don’t even ask about “Hopefully,” and for the pointer I thank Esq. Kevin Lewis.
*Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century*
By George Packer, I thought this book would be dull, but in fact it is interesting throughout. Holbrooke, if you don’t already know, was a lifetime American diplomat, but much more than that too. Here is one excerpt:
After the evacuation of dependents and the arrival of ground troops in 1965, South Vietnam became a vast brothel. But even before there were half a million Americans, sex was an elemental part of the war. “I have the theory that if the women of Vietnam had big copper spoons through their noses and looked like Ubangis,” a reporter once said, “this war wouldn’t have lasted half as long, and maybe wouldn’t have even started.” The whole scene repelled the Boston Puritan Henry Cabot Lodge. “I not only don’t wanna,” he said, “I don’t wanna wanna.”
A vivid passage to be sure, but two points. First, why call the one sensible guy a “Puritan”? (Yes, the Puritans in fact were great, but I don’t think the remark is to be taken in that spirit.) Second, it seems to me that many Ubangi women are likely quite beautiful, and probably I saw some of them while in Ethiopia. Furthermore, at least these days, it is optional whether they wish to take on the famed “lip plate.”
In any case, I would describe the book as “rollicking.” You can order it here.
For the recommendation I thank Mr. C. Weber.
Street-by-street zoning
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, think of it as a new way to push for YIMBY. Here is one excerpt:
I call this idea “street by street zoning,” and it has been outlined in a recent paper by John Myers, co-founder of London YIMBY. The basic idea is simple: Let each street decide on its own how it wants to zone commercial activity, including construction. Of course, in some contexts the deciding entity won’t be a street but rather a block or some other very small neighborhood area.
That might sound a little crazy, like a 1960s hippie commune dream. Yet the idea has hidden potential. If streets chose their own zoning, city-level zoning rules could be quite general and open-ended, opening up the possibilities for more construction and also for more mixed-use neighborhoods. With that liberalizing backdrop, residents on any given street always have the option of more restrictive zoning.
The upside is that street-by-street zoning would allow so much room for experimentation. Some zoning reforms might increase home values; a street might decide to allow for multiple dwellings on a lot (an in-law apartment in a backyard barn?), or make it easier to “upzone” by making it easier to rebuild. And what about allowing, say, a small Sichuan restaurant on each residential street — would that boost home values? Maybe not, but at least there’d be a way to find out.
And:
Some of these problems may be a feature rather than a bug. If outside developers find local communities easier to manipulate than a city-wide board, it may actually result in more new construction. If neighbors on some streets really are not sure what they want, maybe it’s not a bad thing if they are nudged toward approving more new construction.
Imagine dealing with the developers on Coasean terms. There is much more analysis at the link.
What should I ask Samantha Power?
I will be having a Conversations with Tyler with her, no associated public event. She has a new book coming out The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir. So what should I ask her?
Age-Weighted Voting?
The young will experience the effects of policies passed today for the greatest length of time but this is not reflected in their voting power. Put differently, the time-horizon of (self-interested) older voters is short so perhaps this biases the political system towards short time-horizon policies such as deficit spending or kicking the can down the road on global warming. Philosopher William MacAskill offers an alternative, age-weighted voting.
…one way of extending political time horizons and increasing is to age-weight votes. The idea is that younger people would get more heavily weighted votes than older people, very roughly in proportion with life expectancy. A natural first pass system (though I think it could be improved upon) would be:
- 18–27yr olds: 6x voting weight
- 28–37yr olds: 5x voting weight
- 38–47yr olds: 4x voting weight
- 48–57yr olds: 3x voting weight
- 58–67yr olds: 2x voting weight
- 68+yr olds: 1x voting weight
Note that, even with such heavy weights as these, the (effective) median voter age (in the US) would go from 55 to 40. (H/T Zach Groff for these numbers). Assuming that the median voter theorem approximately captures political dynamics of voting, weighting by (approximate) life-expectancy would therefore lengthen political horizons somewhat, but wouldn’t result in young people having all the power.
… In this scenario, all citizens get equal voting weight, it’s just that this voting power is unequally distributed throughout someone’s life.
MacAskill asks the right questions:
- Do younger people actually have more future-oriented views?
- Does extending political horizons by 20 years provide benefits from the perspective of much longer timescales?
- Are younger people less well-informed, and so apt to make worse decisions?
- Is this just a way of pushing particular (left-wing) political views?
- What would actually happen if this were put in place, and how good or bad would those effects be?
- What’s the best mechanism for implementing age-weighting voting?
- What would be the best plan for making age-weighting voting happen in the real world?
See the whole thing for some brief suggestions on answers.
I don’t have a major objection to the proposal, I just don’t think it would improve politics very much. Rational ignorance means that voters don’t know much and rational irrationality means that they don’t care to know more. The problem is collective decision making per se rather than the time-horizon of the non-existent median voter. Still the space of possible governance designs is far larger than the space that we have investigated, let alone used, so I applaud exploration in the design space.